I stepped out of the doors of the La Scala picture house as if I was jumping in at the deep end of Hall Street Baths like I did with my dad last summer. I suppose, too, I thought that once the bombers had gone it might all magically go back to normal, the buildings would be in their places and people would walk about, all the shops open, Mr Chippie in his chip shop. But the wall of fire that I had run through was still there although it had sunk to smoke and embers now, and the row of tenements in Kilbowie that once had been as solid as a cliff at the seaside was full of holes and the holes were full of smoke.
I passed the spot where Annie had lain and picked my way through the fallen rubble, coughing all the way. There was a gigantic hole in the main road with twisted tramlines reaching up to the sky and men down in it working. A small river was flowing from its lower end from a burst water main, which ran down over the sides of the road towards the railway. I’d never seen underneath a road before and might normally have been tempted to stop, but I had more important things to think about.
Over towards Singer’s factory, where my mum worked making sewing machines and guns, the timber yard was still ablaze, hot, huge and orange. I’d overheard people talking about it but now I saw for myself. It was unimaginably big, like hell itself, spread out over a vast area. Perhaps that was what brimstone was like, just as the minister said once in church. He had fearful, angry eyes which he raised to the ceiling. An uncomfortable silence had followed. But then perhaps we were all ‘damned to hell’ like he said when he brought his head back down. He glared first at the stone slabs on the floor and then at us, and then out the door which would have been, now I thought about it, roughly in the direction of Singer’s yard. He may have mentioned a way to avoid hell’s blaze but fear blocked my ears. Too late now.
As a result of the fire in Singer’s timber yard, smoke lay thickly over everything, a clinging, cloying smoke that stank to high heaven, as my dad used to say, and hurt your eyes and nose. Great billows of it rose from Singer’s and hung there preventing any clear view of much else, but even so, I could see from the road which rose over the railway bridge that the Palace picture house had been hit, the Palace where I thought my mum might be. One of its domed towers was gone and black smoke was bursting out of its roof.
I was gripped by that sickness again, that sick blow like I’d been winded, and my legs were shaken by the need to fold. I stood as still as I was able and wiped my nose with my smoky cardigan.
‘Please make her be alright,’ I whispered. ‘Make it alright. Make her be at the Regal. Or the library.’
A gust of wind made the smoke from the Palace judder first to the left and then to the right, as if even the wind was shocked and didn’t know what to do, and a cool sun was trying to push through. I told myself my mother never went to the Palace, or hardly ever; why would she go there last night? I don’t know how long I stood there on the bridge. People passed me, making their way down towards the town hall and the river.
Then a voice beside me said, ‘Lenny? Is that you? Mavis? Did you find Mavis? Oh, good!’
It was a woman’s voice, one I knew and couldn’t place, but was sure I’d heard not long before. I turned and saw Miss Weatherbeaten, my teacher, bending down towards me, and there beside her was Rosie, not Mavis.
‘Rosie!’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? I told you to stay with the hurricane ladies! It’s not Mavis, Miss Weath . . . Miss. It’s Rosie. She can’t find her family but the ladies at the La Scala know.’
‘I see,’ she said, and she looked Rosie up and down. Rosie sniffed.
‘I didn’t want to stay there,’ Rosie said at last. She glared at me as if it was all my fault. ‘I want my mum!’
‘Of course you do and of course you didn’t want to stay there,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten, taking Rosie’s free hand, the one that wasn’t pulling on her earlobe. ‘Where are you going Lenny? You’ve been standing here a wee while.’
Normally when Miss Weatherbeaten asks me a question I answer straightaway. I couldn’t, however, just then. Nothing came out of my mouth. I looked at her. She was wearing an old-fashioned tweed coat with a fluffy collar and huge buttons and I realised I’d never seen her outside before. There were black smudges below her eyes which were more than shadows and not made by smoke.
‘Well?’ she said. This is what she always said if you were slow but not how she usually said it. ‘Lenny?’
She was either very kind or very tired, probably both, because she sighed and it made all the air rush out of me too and it let the trembling in my legs take hold again. I looked at the Palace picture house. It had been her idea after all.
‘Ah,’ she said, and ‘Hmm,’ as if she’d understood.
And try as I might to stop it, my face folded up just like Rosie’s and I felt the sooty snotters run from my nose, and I coughed a kind of sob-cough that felt like barking so that I had to put my hands over my mouth to stop another one escaping, which didn’t work. Soon I was barking and sobbing and retching and shuddering and holding the railway bridge wall to stay upright, and without a coat to hide in.
Miss Weatherbeaten didn’t touch me, or not straightaway. Somehow in the midst of my crying I heard a whine, like the whimpering of a dog that’s been left behind and which turned out to be not wee Rosie, but Miss Weatherbeaten. As soon as I was able I wiped the tears back so that I could see her weeping into the faded silk scarf that had been around her neck. She put her arm lightly around my shoulders, not big and warm like the fur-coat lady because Miss Weatherbeaten was thin like my mum and wore no lipstick, except that I could see she had worn red lipstick like the one my mum had been wearing for going to the pictures. She hugged me lightly and then wiped her face.
‘I’m sure everyone will be alright,’ she said, quietly, as much to herself as to me.
Rosie meanwhile was crying in that tired breathless way, like a baby about to sleep, exhausted by grief. I took her free hand, the one that Miss Weatherbeaten wasn’t holding and gave it a squeeze. Miss Weatherbeaten completed the circle by squeezing mine. After a bit we all seemed to calm down enough to speak again.
‘Right then,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten, suddenly becoming a teacher again and letting go of our hands. ‘This is what we’ll do. We’ll go down to the Palace and see who we can find. And if we’ve no luck there we’ll go to the library.’
‘The library?’ I echoed. So did Rosie.
‘Yes, and the town hall,’ said Miss Weatherbeaten. ‘The library is the control centre and the town hall, is, well, the town hall.’
‘The control centre?’ I said, and Rosie tried to say it too. ‘The town hall?’
‘But first the Palace,’ she said.
‘First the Palace,’ I said after her.
‘Lenny,’ she said.
‘Yes, Miss Weather . . . ?’ I said.
‘Be as brave as you can,’ she said. ‘There’s a good girl.’
Those shudders were threatening to start up again but I fought them hard and didn’t think about my mum being missing presumed dead, or Mavis. Miss Weatherbeaten took our hands again but in a teacherly way this time, so Rosie and I had to let go of each other, and we all started down the road towards the Palace.
The people at the Palace were very nice but some of them were dead; I saw them on the pavement. I had to have a good look too because I couldn’t stop myself and because I wanted to be absolutely sure they hadn’t made a mistake when they said my mum hadn’t been there. I was very glad but also not glad because I really wanted to find her.
Miss Weatherbeaten had a look at the dead people sleeping on the pavement too. I think she knew one of them. She gasped and fumbled with her silk scarf again and told me to take Rosie a little way down the road and she’d catch us up. It wasn’t easy because of the mess, and Rosie was only wee, and I wasn’t sure she was going to come after us at all, she took such a long time about it.
And when she did she talked briskly about stuff we had done at school, about the weather and how the weather was bright that day, if only we could have seen it above the black smoke, and what the reasons for that were, and to tell you the truth it didn’t sound much like the lesson we’d had and she didn’t sound much like a teacher, but her grip on our hands was very familiar and mine was sore. Rosie was having trouble not falling over, the ground was so mixed up, and because Miss Weatherbeaten kept pointing at the sky, even though we couldn’t see it.
I didn’t want to look at the sky, even though sometimes the smoke cleared and it was blue, not any more. I didn’t want to see any killer bees. I didn’t really want to look about me at all the mess and people, but I really, really wanted to find my mum and Mavis, so I had to look, in fact I had to peer and try to see things that I didn’t want to see, though my eyes felt like sandpaper.
Rosie just kept asking for her mum and dad, over and over again.
When we got to the town hall at the bottom of the road there were so many people and they were in such a state I wondered whether we’d ever find anyone, and then we discovered there was a queue to give your name and to ask questions, so we went and found the back of the queue and stood there. We weren’t at the back long. Lots of other people joined us, and other people came past and searched through the queue for people they knew, so after I bit I asked Miss Weatherbeaten if I could do that too. We both told Rosie to ‘stay there’ but somehow she just couldn’t, so in the end she came with me and we wandered in the crowd looking into everyone’s faces.
I found school friends and people I’d seen in shops. There was noise and silence, people crying, and most of us filthy and grey. A lady fell over suddenly and an old man too, and someone helped them over to a wall to lean on. But no-one had seen my mum or Mavis, and Rosie was as silent as the grave, as my gran would have said: just looking, not seeing.
When we came back it was Miss Weatherbeaten’s turn to go and look and when she came back she stood there with us for a while longer and then she said, ‘Your weather report was very, very good, Lenny. Well done!’
Even though I hadn’t slept and was filthy, sore, scared and hungry, I blushed and tried a smile, although given the state of my face she wouldn’t have known. I’d spent a lot of time looking at clouds for the sake of that report. It was strange to be reminded that she was my teacher again and not the kind lady who had cried with us on the bridge by the station.
‘Just thought you’d like to know,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
We stood a while longer, edging slowly towards the desk, and then she said she needed to go and find someone, or find out if her house was still standing, I’m not sure which because all either me or Rosie heard was ‘Stay here.’ I think she also said, ‘I’ll be back soon.’
So we two huddled together because, being a bright spring day meant it was cold, and we hadn’t slept or eaten, and some ladies came round and handed us sandwiches and hot tea which I burnt my lip on but didn’t care. They gave me a dress too, a green one with long sleeves and velvet on the collar, and a coat like my own dark blue coat, and a blue dress and coat the same for Rosie. I put my old dress, what was left of it, over the new one because I needed somewhere to keep the shoe, and I was cold. I helped Rosie on with hers.
We seemed to be there forever. I decided three times to leave and find Mavis and my mum myself and then changed my mind, and then suddenly we were at the desk. I didn’t recognise the lady there.
‘I’m Lenny Gillespie,’ I told her and I explained that I’d lost both Mavis and my mum.
‘I see, and who’s this?’ she wanted to know.
‘That’s Rosie,’ I said. Rosie stared at her over the desk.
‘Hello, Rosie,’ said the lady.
‘I’ve lost my mum,’ said Rosie, very slowly. ‘And my dad, and my gran and my sister and . . . .’ She was pulling at her earlobe again. I took hold of her other hand the way Miss Weatherbeaten had.
‘Oh, dear,’ said the lady kindly. ‘Where do you live?’
Rosie was pulling hard at her ear and staring at the papers on the table. The kind lady asked her question again and after a bit Rosie shook her head. The kind lady sat back in her chair and sighed.
‘She was in the shelter and the others were on their way there,’ I said. I had started to explain but Rosie put her hands flat over both ears, closed her eyes and said loudly, ‘I want my mum! I want my mum!’
I tugged at her wrist but she wouldn’t let me take her hands from her ears, so I said to the kind lady, ‘Mr Chippie, I mean the ARP man, he only brought her.’ I shrugged.
She nodded that she had understood, and swallowed hard.
‘Ah,’ she said.
We both looked at Rosie. Her eyes were open but she still had her hands over her ears. She was looking at the kind lady.
‘Oh, dear,’ said the lady. ‘What’s her surname?’
‘I think it’s Thomas or Tomlin or something like that. I can’t remember.’
I got down in front of Rosie and gently pulled her hands from her ears.
‘Thomas or Tomlin?’ I said.
‘Tomlin,’ she said.
‘Rosie Tomlin,’ said the kind lady. ‘What a nice name.’ She checked down a list in front of her, then lifted her glasses off her nose and looked very worried. ‘Well, Rosie Tomlin, you had better come behind this desk here and sit with me.’
Rosie looked at me crouched on the floor in front of her, her hand still in mine, and she glanced just briefly from me to the kind lady and back again, uncertain what to do. She shifted on her feet until she was squared up to me and stopped there, stock-still.
‘No, Rosie,’ I said. ‘You go with her. I have to find Mavis and my mum.’
The kind lady persuaded her by saying there was another little girl who would be staying with her too and that her grandchildren lived next door and it would only be for a while anyway, but they had jam in the cupboard and a new baby over the road.
‘And if you like,’ she said, ‘Lenny here, can come and visit you.’
‘Will my mum be there? And my big sister?’
The kind lady looked worried again. She didn’t answer Rosie’s question. She just shifted over in her seat and patted the cushion beside her.
‘You come and sit here,’ she said.
After a bit Rosie decided this was alright and let go of my hand and went and sat on the edge of the kind lady’s seat.
Again, just like in the La Scala I was overcome with some strange kind of fury. It felt like I was angry with Rosie but how could that be? I felt angry and sick again when I thought about my mum and Mavis, but I couldn’t be angry with them – how could I? And I felt as if I’d been shrunk to the same size as Rosie, the same size as Mavis, and my stomach churned as I stood there looking at Rosie and the kind lady on the same chair at the other side of the desk.
‘Now, Lenny Gillespie,’ she said as if memorising my name, ‘what about you?’
I was just about to reply, my mouth was open and everything, but a boy came into the room with a piece of paper and handed it to the kind lady, who read it and checked it against her list of people in front of her on the table. She looked up at me and back at her list. Her finger ran down a column of names, once then twice, then a third time. I tried to read the upside-down writing but it was too squiggly and there were lots of smudges.
She asked me if I had relatives anywhere nearby, any neighbours, had I been evacuated at the beginning of the war, anywhere I could go, anyone I could stay with, at least for a couple of days?
I told her I didn’t know, I just wanted my mum and my wee sister, and she said, ‘Your mum has been taken to hospital.’
The air seemed to be sucked right out of me and I thought I was going to be sick suddenly. The top of my head prickled with heat.
‘She’s going to be alright,’ she said, ‘but she was caught under a building. Where did you say you lived?’ She glanced at her list again. ‘She was just around the corner, not far from the canal. They got her out about five a.m. I’m not sure which hospital it will be. I’m sure they’ll send word back when they know themselves.’
‘Was Mavis with her?’ I said.
I wanted her either to say it wasn’t true, just kidding, or to say it all again because I knew I couldn’t remember it all. But worst of all, Mavis wasn’t with her.
‘Which hospital?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They’ll let us know as soon as they know themselves.’
I got her to tell me everything again and then she said she had to get on with the next person and why didn’t I go to the school? There were buses going to be leaving from there evacuating everyone that was left, just in case. In case of what? In case it happened again. Happened again? How could it happen again? Rosie was looking at me now.
‘I can’t take you home too, Lenny,’ said the kind lady. ‘I’m sorry but I can only take the really wee ones. You have to go and find a bus to get on.’
Now I was really furious.
‘But what about Mavis!’ I shouted. ‘I can’t leave Mavis!’
‘Shouting is not going to help anyone,’ said the kind lady sternly, and I knew she was right, only I was still feeling the same size as Rosie and Mavis. ‘When they find her they’ll bring news of her here,’ she said quietly.
The people behind me were still waiting and she looked over my head at them now.
As I made my way through the crowd I looked back at Rosie. She watched me until I couldn’t see her any more and probably for a bit longer too. I stood on the steps of the town hall and saw that the library had been hit and books were scattered all over the road. Some men in clean suits and coats were going up the steps, oddly bright without the grime that covered the rest of us. It was the control centre. Looking at the broken door at its entrance it seemed a funny sort of thing to call it.
The day was bright but a heavy haze of smoke sat on the still air, unmoving, as if trying to hide us all, and made it dark. I stood as I had on the steps of the La Scala and, like last year with my dad, I jumped off at the deep end and strode purposefully through the crowd and the debris, down the road past the library with its broken books, past broken tenements and broken people, checking their faces one by one, but seeing no-one I knew. They had budgies in cages and crockery in prams and great big bundles on their backs. Most of them were heading the same way as me, going west, out of town. A strange silence hung over them like the hovering smoke and I wondered whether something might explode if anyone disturbed it.
Inside me I felt those explosions, like the explosions of a little engine driving me on with all my strength until I came to the canal underpass and passed under and up onto the tow path by the green, green canal water and began to retrace the steps Mavis and I had taken, and shortly after, it would seem, my mum. As I got closer to home I found people I knew.
‘Lenny,’ said the scary man from up our street, the one whose close I’d looked in for ages for Mavis, and who had a special stick for naughty kids like me.
I’d only seen him once before and he looked smaller than I remembered and dirty of course. He was wearing a brown jacket and trousers and a brown tweed cap. He wasn’t carrying his stick but I wasn’t taking any chances and kept well back.
‘Lenny, did you hear about your mum?’ he said. ‘They’ve taken her to the hospital.’
‘Did you see her?’ I said. ‘Is she alright?’
‘She was under there a very long time,’ he said. He made a funny noise with his lip and looked at me sideways. ‘Are you alright? You got burnt I see. Your hair is all gone.’
I touched my short, frizzy hair.
‘Under where?’ I said.
‘Under there.’ He pointed to the smouldering building beside us, what was left of it. ‘But I saw her when she came out. Her legs were in bad shape and she didn’t want to go in the ambulance because she didn’t know where you two were, but she was talking. She’s alive.’ He smiled at me. ‘She only stopped in the close to shelter a minute. I saw her running up the street. But where’s Mavis?’
‘Don’t know.’ I was too scared to tell him I’d lost her, even without his stick, so I tried a smile so he’d think everything was alright.
He nodded slowly and pursed his lips the way I’d seen the headmistress at our school do, and his face seemed to wrinkle up as if he was an old, old man, which I don’t think he was, only old, or older than my dad anyway.
‘Someone will have her,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry. Ask at the town hall.’
An old lady hobbled over to us. She came out of the building opposite carrying a big bundle tied in a grey blanket with a brown belt and some string. It was almost the same size as her. She dropped the bundle at our feet, nearly knocking me over.
‘Mavis was in our back court,’ she said, breathing heavily. ‘You’re Peggy’s girl aren’t you? Peggy Gillespie?’
I tipped my head. Peggy’s girl, yes I’m Peggy’s girl.
‘Poor Peggy,’ she said, still breathing heavily from her bundle. ‘And I wondered about Mavis being out on her own when I saw her from my window. She was with the girl downstairs, and when the siren went she jumped up and ran off saying she had to find Lenny. That’s you isn’t it?’
‘That’s me, Lenny,’ I said, my voice not much more than a whisper now.
‘She went that way,’ she said, pointing up the street where most of the buildings were burning. There wasn’t much street to see because of the debris.
‘That way?’ I didn’t like this.
‘Yes,’ she said. We all three stared up the road.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw her with my own eyes, don’t you say otherwise. I saw her. One of her shoes was wet. Must have stood in a puddle.’
I put my hand in my pocket.
‘It wasn’t a puddle,’ I said. ‘It was . . . .’
‘Don’t you tell me what I did and didn’t see!’ she said. ‘Don’t you tell me I’m wrong! I saw what I saw. Don’t you tell me!’
‘That’s not what she meant,’ said the scary man with the stick. I wondered if he still had his stick and whether he ever used it on old ladies.
He touched my shoulder and turned me away from her. He smelled of smoke like we all did but he didn’t smell like other men, all sharp and sweet and not clean: just smokey. I didn’t want to go with him but I didn’t want to stay there either, and while the old lady was trying to get her bundle up onto her back he touched the side of his head to indicate she was mad.
‘Don’t mind her, Lenny, and don’t mind Mavis either. She’ll have gone into one of the shelters up that way and be absolutely fine. Ask at the town hall but get down to the buses as soon as you can and get yourself out of here. Have you no family? No, of course you don’t. They’ll all be too far away, won’t they? Why don’t you stick with me a minute and I’ll take you down to the buses? That’s where I’m going.’
He had a soft voice that I liked, but he had a stick for naughty kids like me too, so I said, no thank you very much, I wanted to go home to see if Mavis was there yet and I told him there was a kind lady at the town hall who was going to take us both to stay with her. This was a lie of course, but sometimes lies are alright; my mum said so.
‘Cheeky wee midden, just like her mother!’ screeched the old woman as she went past, heading back the way I had come.
‘Don’t mind her now,’ said the scary man with the stick.
I thanked him and, taking another gulp of not very clean air, started further on up the road Mavis had taken.
It was a strange thing not knowing whether to be wildly happy because Mum wasn’t dead and lying in a corridor without us beside her, or terrified because her legs were bad, like Annie, who was lying in a corridor. And I had the same discomfort about Mavis, except I had no idea at all about her and didn’t know what to think of all these grown-ups telling me she was bound to be alright when so many people were absolutely not alright. There was no way of knowing who was going to be alright and who wasn’t.
I didn’t know what to think at all so I tried very hard not to think about anything, but it wasn’t very easy.